My Soul to Keep (African Immortals)

  “How can you speak of love? Love for mortals?” Mahmoud said. “There are plenty of nests for your cock. Visit brothels in Addis Ababa, if physical lusts guide you. But you should have love for Khaldun and your brothers only.”

  Dawit stood rigid, angry. “As always, you mock what you do not understand. And you are coarse.”

  “I understand more than I care to confess, Dawit. You know my past conduct like no one else. But I do not crave to be what I am not.”

  “What do you crave to be, then? A silly clairvoyant in the House of Mystics? Or worse, aspiring to spend dozens of years at a time in meditation, content with a breathing death?”

  “Now it is you who mocks what he does not understand,” Mahmoud said.

  “Tell me, looking into my eyes, you prefer trances and mind exercises to all else.”

  “I prefer my own kind,” Mahmoud said, his gaze unblinking. Impatiently, he scooped the cat out of his lap and tossed it to the floor. The cat turned to hiss at him over his shoulder, then scampered away. Mahmoud stood, brushing fur from his trousers. “Enough of this talk. You have heard my message. I will wait, but not very long. And remember this: I can take measures to convince you.”

  “Now you threaten me?”

  “No threat, my brother, merely an observation,” Mahmoud said, standing close to Dawit to probe his eyes. “Without the woman and child, you have no reason to stay.”

  “State your meaning,” Dawit whispered, enraged.

  “My meaning is clear. This trip you propose with them is unacceptable. You cannot flee to France. I know you, Dawit … I am unhappy to think it, but I am afraid you are tempted to break the Covenant. I will not permit it. Begin to accept that you must leave.”

  “I’ll say this,” Dawit said, raising his finger near Mahmoud’s nose. “Your life will be a living hell if you hurt either one of them. You will die a new death daily. Teferi’s fate will be a respite compared to yours, you whore’s son.”

  Mahmoud’s face seemed to narrow. “My mother may have been a whore, as you well know, but I never took one for a wife!”

  Dawit’s arms flew up to push Mahmoud, but Mahmoud’s hands were quicker, taking a firm grip of Dawit’s wrists to hold them still. Mahmoud, Dawit realized with surprise, was stronger. “Do not incite me, Dawit, or you will leave today. Only our friendship makes me wait.”

  “I have to leave them soon enough, in years to come! Leave me in peace! I have a right to love my wife and daughter!” Dawit cried, ashamed to find himself so distraught in his friend’s presence. There were tears in his voice. He was so angry that his Arabic felt sluggish in his mind as he tried to find the right words to express himself.

  “What you speak is betrayal, nothing less.”

  “Betrayal? What I speak is human!”

  “And are you human?” Mahmoud asked with curled lips, flinging Dawit’s wrists away from him.

  “We are humans, all of us. The Life gift does not make us other than human. We were born to mortal humans. We bleed and hurt like humans. We are immortal, but human still!”

  Suddenly, inexplicably, Mahmoud grinned. His eyes shone with a mean-spirited delight. “Incidentally, your mortal pet is home early, Dawit. You didn’t hear her car drive up?”

  Dawit gasped. His peripheral vision told him someone was in the doorway. It was Jessica. She stood with her lips parted, clinging tightly to her purse, her expression lost in alarm and confusion. How long had she been standing there? What had she overheard? Dawit was paralyzed where he stood.

  “David …” Jessica said in a faint breath, “who is this?”

  The Arabic! She could not understand. Relieved, Dawit attempted to recover himself and raised his palm to press it against his forehead, where he could feel the race of his heart in his veins. “I didn’t see you there, baby,” he told her in English. “I’m sorry. This is a friend. Mahmoud, this is—”

  Mahmoud only sneered at Dawit and pushed his way past. “I have no time for nonsense, Dawit,” he said in Arabic. “You heard what I came to say. Tell your plaything goodbye.”

  When Mahmoud didn’t slow his stride, as though he could not see Jessica and intended to walk through her, she darted to the side of the doorway to give him room to pass. Dawit and Jessica stood motionless, gazing at each other, as they heard Mahmoud’s bare feet thump down the stairs, and then the front door opened and closed with a slam. Jessica’s face was drawn, stunned. The gentle music swirled around them, swathing their silence with its deceptive calm.

  25

  It was a beautiful night, with a bright moon reflecting from behind a patchwork of dramatic clouds, a painting in the sky. And yet it was a horrible night. Jessica wished she could be anywhere but where she was, doing anything else.

  “You were fighting. I saw him push you,” she said wearily, resting her head on her arms, which were folded across the picnic table. At last count, this was her sixth attempt to have a conversation with David that would smooth away the mystery of the afternoon. She’d tried three times before she went back to her office, and three more times since she’d been home. By now, she was tired and scared to her core.

  The hamburgers David had grilled for dinner were still stacked on a plate in front of her, cold and congealing with grease. Kira had scarfed down her own hamburger, and now she was amusing herself by probing the gardenia bushes for lizards with a twig from the backyard rubber tree. Teacake skulked alongside her, waiting to pounce at anything that moved. It would be very dark soon.

  “Yes, we were arguing,” David said tonelessly, staring at his clean, untouched plate.

  “Tell me again who it was.”

  “His name is Mahmoud. He’s a former student. He was upset about a grade.”

  Jessica, enraged, sighed and closed her eyes. Who the fuck did he think he was talking to? He was lying.

  “I know I haven’t taught in many years,” David went on quietly. “He’s been out of the country. He’s held a grudge. Can I help it if he’s unbalanced?”

  Jessica didn’t answer, her eyes still closed. She was surprised that she’d managed to keep from shouting or screaming or crying this long. She’d come home for lunch and found her husband arguing with a half-naked man in their bedroom, and his explanation— when she finally managed to pull it out of him—was the lamest one she could imagine. Jessica had interviewed enough people who openly lied to her face to recognize crap when she heard it.

  “When you first introduced him,” Jessica said, one careful word at a time, “you claimed he was a friend.”

  David gazed out at the water, and she followed his gaze. The lamps in their next-door neighbor’s backyard were reflecting in the current, writhing snakes of faint red and green. David swallowed hard. Lord, Jessica observed, he was really no good at this. She wished he could muster a better lie, so she wouldn’t be forced to push for whatever the truth was.

  “Tell me, then, what you think,” David said.

  Jessica glanced at Kira, who was engaged in a lively conversation with Teacake yards away from them, near the back door leading to the screened-in porch. Jessica called out, warning her not to kneel in the mud beneath the bushes. “I won’t, Mommy,” Kira called back. Hearing Kira’s voice brought Jessica much closer to tears.

  “I don’t know what to think, David,” she said, returning her eyes to him. “What should I think?”

  David tried a hollow smile. “At the risk of sounding very trite, it isn’t what it looked like. He’s not a lover, if that’s what you’re thinking. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  Jessica sighed, wiping the stinging corner of her eye. “I’ll tell you something I learned from my mother. After my father died, she and Alex had horrible fights. Alex was going through this Rasta phase, when she wouldn’t comb her hair and smoked weed in her bedroom with the door locked. The shouting made me crazy. The anger was so big, it was everywhere. One day I asked my mother why they were saying such hateful things to each other. And my mother stroked my head and explained
something I truly believe: We only waste energy to have horrible fights with the people we love the most. And that fight I saw today was not between a teacher and a student. It just wasn’t. So you’re going to have to come up with something better than that.”

  David hung his head, silent. He, too, wiped away a tear.

  So, this was it. She’d broken through. Lord help her.

  Jessica took a deep breath, gathering her courage. “And you need to come up with it soon. Because you know what? I just realized I’m sitting here trying to figure out where my daughter and I are going to spend the night.”

  David made a pained sound and reached out to squeeze her hand. She felt sick to her stomach. She didn’t have the strength to move her hand away, so she left it beneath his, immobile.

  “Don’t do that, Jess.”

  “Then talk to me, David. Right now.”

  He nodded emphatically. “I’ll do my best. I don’t know what I can tell you.”

  “How about something that isn’t complete bullshit? That would be a good start.”

  Studying him, she believed she could actually see the wheels turning in his head, his struggle to decide what to reveal and what not to reveal. It infuriated her, frightened her. How much was there inside him that was as foreign as this barefoot Middle Eastern man who nearly tried to knock her over? As tempted as she was, Jessica hadn’t even called Alex to share the latest bizarre twist to her life. Alex probably would have told her to pack her bags and get an AIDS test, which wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

  David held his hands in front of him, almost as though to pray, and he absently tapped his fingers together, one after the other, beginning with his pinkies and moving to his thumbs. Nerves, she knew. She was nervous too.

  “I will admit,” David said with difficulty, “that there are some aspects of my life you know nothing about.”

  Jessica felt a severe cramp in her stomach, and she winced. David went on, his voice very low. “But those aspects do not include another lover; male, female, or otherwise. I have to ask for your trust on this point. If I lied about Mahmoud, it’s only because explaining him would mean having to explain vast complications that I never intended to share with anyone. And I hope you don’t take that as a personal affront, Jessica. But you know I have had a difficult and scattered life. There are many parts of it I intended to leave behind me.”

  “And he’s one of them?”

  David nodded slowly. “Yes. Very much so. I haven’t seen him in years, and he suddenly dropped in today unannounced.”

  “Who is he?” Jessica asked.

  David blinked rapidly. “We grew up together. We both spent years with the missionaries in Africa, in Egypt. He is like a brother to me, both in good ways and bad. We had a falling out many years ago. He is like blood, and you can’t escape blood.”

  “What made you fight?” Jessica asked.

  “My father’s money,” David answered painfully. “He grew jealous that I was suddenly so well off. We’d both been penniless before that. I tried to help him, to encourage him to go to school—and I even offered to pay—but he made unreasonable demands. So, we don’t speak now. Until today. You see how it went.”

  That was all. Slowly, Jessica felt her stomach unwinding. Her breathing, once again, felt unrestrained in her lungs. “Why didn’t you just say that before?” she asked.

  David shrugged. “I’ve noticed that Americans seem to enjoy living in their unhappy pasts, Jessica,” he said. “I do not.”

  At this, Jessica almost smiled. True, David often complained he didn’t understand the rationale behind TV talk shows where guests paraded their miseries for entertainment. He derided the thought of most therapy, insisting that people should learn to grow past traumas and rely on inner strength to become reborn. She agreed with him, in part, but she also wished he could learn to be more open about himself and his life before he met her. Sometimes, she had to admit that they were still virtual strangers.

  But this crisis had passed. Thank you, Jesus.

  Jessica squeezed David’s hand and raised it to her lips to kiss his fingers. “Thank you. That’s all I wanted. We’ll leave it, for now,” she said. She glanced at Kira and found her patting the mud with her hands. She thought about scolding her, but didn’t. Kira was wearing her after-school grunge clothes, and there wasn’t really any way to keep kids away from mud.

  “I’m still worried about Kira,” she said. “Do you think we should call a specialist?”

  David shook his head. “We should go to France. We should start again. Distance from troubles eases them.”

  “Not all the time, David,” she said, noticing the layers of sadness wearing at his face, his lips. Seeing Mahmoud had really shaken him, she could see. Please let me in, David, her mind implored. Just once, let me inside. “But I’ve been thinking about it, and I think France is a good idea. I’m getting excited.”

  David brightened, but only slightly, as he leaned over to kiss her cheek. “Good. I’ll start making some calls,” he said, picking up the spatula to lift a cold hamburger to his plate. His expression was unreadable as he fumbled to open the twist-tie on the bag of buns.

  She believed his story about Mahmoud. It wasn’t just wanting to believe, she told herself. She believed.

  Jessica’s stomach growled. Her appetite was back, too. “One day, David, I want you to tell me all about Mahmoud. I want you to tell me everything. Okay?”

  David nodded, meeting her eyes. “Yes,” he whispered, meaning it. “Very soon, I’ll tell you everything. I promise you that.”

  Jessica smiled.

  PART THREE

  The Covenant

  Love me, honey, love me true?

  Love me well ez I love you?

  An’ she answe’d, “’Cose I do”—

  Jump back, honey, jump back.

  —“A NEGRO LOVE SONG”

  PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

  1890s

  26

  “Teacake? Here, kitty. Come here, kitty, kitty.”

  Dawit’s whisper-call was the loudest sound in the calm of the yard, which was wrapped in a darkness reminiscent of the heart of a woodland. It was two o’clock in the morning, and when Dawit awakened he’d expected to find the creature curled at the foot of their bed in his usual spot. But he was gone, tonight of all nights. He wasn’t in the bedroom chair, he wasn’t sleeping on his favorite bookshelf at the foot of the stairs, he wasn’t flopped across Kira, and he wasn’t warming himself against the refrigerator vent on the shiny kitchen linoleum.

  Was the animal psychic? Teacake always seemed to know exactly when Jessica’s car would drive up in the evenings, no matter how early or late. He posted himself at the front window to wait for her. Even Kira had noticed this, and she would shout, “Teacake says Mommy’s coming!” Perhaps Teacake had altered his habits because he sensed what was to come.

  “Teacake, where are you?”

  Dawit’s Durabeam flashlight, part of the hurricane-season stockpile collected by Jessica, swept across the yard’s countless leaves and blooms, pebbles on the pathway, isolated blades of grass, and the rims of the Tempo’s tires. Dawit crouched beneath the vehicle to search for the cat, smelling the pun-gence of collected motor oil. Only asphalt and pebbles. The same beneath the van.

  Goddamnit. He shouldn’t have waited this long, until the night before the weekend trip. He should have done this sooner.

  Dawit wiped nervous perspiration from his face and glanced at the glowing hands of his watch. He’d already been up for ten minutes. If Jessica sensed, even subconsciously, that he’d left the bed, she would ask him questions. So far, he’d been pretty good about limiting his work to twenty minutes a night—or, even better, to the daylight hours when Jessica and Kira were away. Jessica was a sound sleeper, but he didn’t want to risk making her suspicious of him at the one time she would need to trust him most of all.

  Where was that fucking cat? Mr. DeNight or someone would probably call the police if he kept cre
eping around his yard with a flashlight. At the last homeowners’ association meeting, the Neighborhood Watch president warned them that an intruder had been sighted lingering on the streets after dark. Probably Mahmoud, Dawit thought. Mahmoud was no doubt observing him at this very instant, wondering what he was up to.

  “Teee-cake …”

  As he climbed the rocky embankment in the center of the yard, the flashlight’s wide beam found the mouth of the cave, drawing exaggerated shadows cast from overgrown weeds, moss, and jutting stone. The cave was another of Teacake’s favorite spots, but usually during the day. Would he have come at night?

  Dawit squatted at the entrance and poked the flashlight inside. He heard a loud hissssss even before the light sought out the corner where Teacake was crouched, his tail puffed like a chimney brush. The cat bared his teeth and hissed again. Teacake’s eyes glowed a luminescent red in the beam.

  “It’s just me, dummy,” Dawit said in a soothing tone. “This is how you show your gratitude for six years of free room and board, you little miscreant?”

  Teacake recognized his voice. He flicked his tail around himself and mewed, then gnawed at something irritating his front paw. “So, are you coming out or am I coming in?” Dawit asked.

  Teacake licked himself, not moving otherwise. Cats were so blasted contrary. Dawit steadied himself with one hand against the low-hanging stone at the mouth and climbed down the narrow, makeshift steps into the cave.

  Dawit kneeled and scratched Teacake beneath his chin, eliciting a garbled purr, then he scooped the cat under one arm. “You should be grateful to me,” Dawit muttered, kissing Teacake’s nose as he grabbed his flashlight with his free hand before standing. “I have an invaluable gift for you.”

  The shed on the north side of the house was a tacky remnant of the previous owner, fashioned after a wooden barn painted dark red. Inside, Dawit housed the lawn mower, his toolbox, the pruning shears, the stepladder, and an array of items that didn’t fit in the house, including the tricycle Kira had outgrown. She’d been promised a bigger bicycle with training wheels for Christmas.